SOURCE: Cronin, Gloria L. “Those Dreadful Mothers.” In A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow, pp. 37-49. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Cronin asserts that there is a feminine presence in Bellow's novels.

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

—William Faulkner, Lion in the Garden

The androcentric text, by its very nature, is rarely able to see the feminine. In Bellow's middle to later novels in particular, however, even his most narcissistic monologists experience a melancholic absence, a place of emptiness, or an abyss that draws them to seek that missing element of the feminine which is symbolized in the Bellow text as...